Author: red_moo

What’s been done

The first blog post that describes the idea and goals can be read here, the first update here and the second one here.

So the Google Summer of Code came to a close. It was an interesting journey of learning, adapting and frustration. First I struggled with setting up the work space to work on LEDE platform. It was in the end successful and the whole process well documented, from setting up the virtual machines for running nodewatcher and nodewatcher-agent to actually coding, compiling and updating the agent with new packages. The end product is working HMAC signing of agent’s report messages that are sent to the nodewatcher. It can be used as a lightweight alternative to SSL certificates.

After that I tackled the task of improving the Tunneldigger, but was again met with deprecated documentation that wasn’t helpful at setting things up. After much struggle and digging around Slack I managed to get things going. Unfortunately my health disagreed and prevented me from finishing the task fully.

What’s next

If possible, I intend to finish the last task anyway so my contribution to wlan-si and Google Summer of Code is complete.

What’s been done

The first blog post that describes the idea and goals can be read here and the first update here.

The data that the nodewatcher receives from nodes had no signature, so anyone could intercept the packets, change the content and send them on their merry way. Authentication using SSL certificates was already implemented, but a lightweight, fast solution, that doesn’t require the use of big libraries like OpenSSL and any extra dependencies on nodes was desired. That means two things. First finding a good sha256 implementation or writing my own. Some libraries implement extra precautions to prevent side-channel attacks, which take advantage of some physical characteristic of the implementation. Even then not all implementations are safe depending on the system on which the algorithms run. It was decided that in this context these attacks don’t bother us too much and the attacker would need physical access to the device anyway. Therefore Brad Conte’s open source implementation was used.

The second part involved writing the hash-based message authentication code. I tried to optimize the algorithm as much as possible saving space and time. After combining both parts the correctness of implemented HMAC-sha256 was thoroughly tested using official test vectors.

The extra option to select the desired authentication was added to nodewatcher-agent, with SSL certificates being the default. If HMAC signing was selected, a HMAC signing key needs to be provided. The signature converted to base64 is then inserted in to the message header and checked when received by the nodewatcher.

What’s been done

The first blog post that describes the idea and goals can be read here.

After getting a bit more familiar with the code base the first thing that had to be done was to set up the work environment. I chose to go the virtual machine route so an actual router did not need to be used, making the development easier. An instance of the nodewatcher is running on a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux. It runs in a Docker development environment and is set up by using the provided Docker Compose configuration. To enable data collection from nodes the monitor system also needs to be running.

To test the the nodewatcher’s HMAC signing capabilities I set up a dummy test node, turned on HMAC signing and used a python script to push some data on to the nodewatcher.

The next step was to set up a development node. With a lot of help from my mentor Kostko I used firmware-core to create a LEDE virtual machine, compile nodewatcher-agent packages, transferred them to the LEDE machine, used SSH to connect to it, installed them and tested the basic nodewatcher-agent functions. The whole setup and development process was documented in detail in the nodewatcher-agent README. Then I set up the agent’s http.push module and pushed some data on to the nodewatcher instance.

A local network like one in the above image was set up for development. Due to my lack of experience with networking I encountered some issues like not being able to ssh into the LEDE VM and not being able to send packets from LEDE VM to Nodewatcher VM, but with patience from my mentor it all works and the lesson was surely learned.

What’s next

So the hardest part is done, right? I am now working on adding a HMAC signing like it’s already done in the python script. It needs to be developed for both pushing the data from a node to the nodewatcher and pulling the data from a node.

I am a student at Faculty of Computer and Information Science in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Like (almost) every “computer enthusiast” I liked gaming and later found myself developing an OpenGL graphics engine. All engrossed in C++ and all sorts of algorithmic challenges I slowly came to realize that something is missing. Yes, my knowledge of anything network related. So, combining my two other interests, those being information security and inexplicable love of tunnels, I applied myself to Google Summer Of Code with the following ideas. As a participant in this year’s Google Summer of Code I will develop some new goodies for two projects of wlan slovenija open wireless network.

The first one is for the nodewatcher, which is an open source system for planning, deployment and monitoring of the wireless network. It is a centralized web interface which is also used for generating on OpenWrt based firmware images for specific nodes. After flashing the wireless router with the generated image, it just needs to be fed some electricity and it automatically connects into the network using VPN, or in case of an existing nearby node wirelessly. Nodwatcher then collects all the data about node’s performance by connecting to nodes to obtain data, or by nodes pushing their data to nodewatcher. This data is not sensitive, but we can still worry about it being manipulated or faked while in transit between the node and nodewatcher. The problem though is that all the monitoring reports are currently unsigned. This poses a security risk in the form of a spoofing attack, where anyone could falsify the messages sent to the nodewatcher. The solution is to assign a unique nodewatcher signing key to every node. The node will then sign the monitoring output using a hash function in HMAC (Hash-based message authentication code) mode. This means that a computed “signature” would be sent along with every message and nodewatcher can check whether the data was altered in any way. In the event of a signature verification failure a warning will be generated within the nodewatcher monitoring system. This is imporatant, because it assures the integrity of recieved data and inspires confidence in using it to plan deployment of new nodes in the future.

The second contribution will be to the Tunneldigger, which is a simple VPN tunneling solution based on L2TPv3 tunnels. It is used to connect nodes which do not have a wireless link between them in to a common network. Using existing network connectivity it creates L2TP tunnels between nodes. The current limitation is that tunnels can only be established over IPv4. This poses a problem because due to dramatic growth of the internet, the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses is anticipated for some time now. The solution is the use of its successor, IPv6. Since the tunnels are already capable of carrying IPv6 traffic, the capability of establishing them over IPv6 will be developed. The Tunneldigger will also support IPv4/IPv6 mixed environment where both server and client have some form of IPv6 connectivity. That way the Tunneldigger will finally be made future proof!